


Quartet

by fewthistle



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-21 19:20:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/903909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fewthistle/pseuds/fewthistle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four Janeway/Crusher ficlets I wrote over the past few years. I find I really love this pairing. There's a symmetry and a rightness to it, for me at least.  Set post everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quartet

**Maybe**  
  
  
Kathryn still wasn’t used to sunlight. Not Earth’s sun, at least. Not this summer light, harsh and white and unforgiving as it forced its way through the empty space between the curtains, an unwanted gatecrasher, too early, or too late, to the party. Last night at the reception, she had been the hero returned from the wars, the sailor back from the sea. Last night, she had smiled a knowing, secretive smile, told harrowing tales of their adventures on the far side of the universe.  
  
She had been flattered by the attention, heart warmed by the sight of a familiar face, the auburn hair surrounding it grown longer and lighter with the years. Felt a surge of something almost like passion at the touch of a slender hand along her cheek. Grasped desperately to the notion that she was desired, that she wasn’t too old or too forgotten to get the girl. Even if the girl wasn’t a girl anymore.  
  
In the pitiless morning glare, Kathryn was no longer young and desirable, no longer the brash captain who had sailed her gleaming white ship into the yawing blackness of space. She was just another middle-aged woman, crow’s feet and laugh lines and a few gray hairs, lying in bed next to another middle-aged woman, face relaxed in sleep, her mussed auburn hair adorning the pillow.  
  
It was only when Beverly sleepily opened her eyes, the deep blue of her gaze settling fondly on Kathryn’s face, that the years once again fell away, the light took on a faint, golden glow and Kathryn was once again the brilliant, lovely young Science officer who dreamed of her own command and a certain Starfleet doctor. And maybe that brief moment of forgetting was almost enough to make up for the years and the friends she had lost, for the guilt, the burden, the lifetime of recriminations. Maybe.  
  
And then Beverly smiled and reached for her again and she knew. She knew.

**Enough**  
  
  
“I always imagined that you’d end up with Picard,” Kathryn murmured, voice muffled against the smooth skin of a shoulder, drawing Beverly from the fuzzy edges of slumber. “Head of Starfleet medical, married to the pride of the fleet. Wait, that’s Enterprise, not its illustrious captain. Or are they one and the same?”  
  
“I always imagined that you would go out in a blaze of glory, ramming your ship into the side of a Borg cube, yelling, ‘damn the torpedoes’ or something equally ridiculous.” Beverly replied sleepily, ignoring the baited hook that inevitably lead them down dead-end paths. Far too late for another argument. Far too late at night. Far too late in life. “And yet, here we are.”  
  
“Here we are.”  
  
“Is it enough?” Beverly asked softly into the darkness, eyes straining to make out the sculpted curves of Kathryn’s face. Funny that after eight months she was still uncertain of the answer.  
  
“It’s enough. It’s more than enough. It’s everything,” Kathryn answered, her words as solid and real and warm as the thick blanket that covered them.  
  
Snuggling deeper into Kathryn’s arms, Beverly allowed the lassitude to steal over her limbs once again, her voice in the dark room holding more than a hint of gravel.  
  
“I did, you know? I did end up with the pride of the fleet. And not the one named Enterprise.”  
  
Beverly could feel Kathryn’s smile against the skin of her neck.  
  
“Goodnight, Dr. Crusher,” Kathryn chuckled.  
  
“Goodnight, Captain Janeway.”  
  
  
 **My City or Mountains**  


“You aren’t actually going to wear those, are you?” Beverly asked, one eyebrow raised as her eyes raked up and down Kathryn’s still lovely form.

“Why? What’s wrong with them?” Kathryn responded defensively, her hands smoothing down the fabric along the curve of each hip. She twisted her upper torso, neck craning around to get a better view of her backside. “Don’t tell me that they make my ass look big?”

Beverly chuckled, a wry smile turning up one corner of her lips, blue eyes crinkling in amusement. “No, Kathryn, they do not make your ass look big. In fact, it’s the best looking forty-six year old ass I know.”

“You know a lot of forty-six year old asses, do you?” Kathryn replied a trifle acerbically, standing sideways to get a better look at herself in the glass door to the patio.

“I know one who’s on the verge of greatness at the moment. And no, that wasn’t intended as a compliment,” Beverly answered drolly, leaning forward from her place on the sofa to pick up her wine glass.

“Well, that’s good to know. I wasn’t going to take it as one,” Kathryn stated sardonically. “So, now that we’ve cleared up the relative size of ass in question, why exactly do you think I shouldn’t wear these pants?”

“Because you and your ass are the same age and those pants were intended for a much younger ass to wear them,” Beverly supplied, pushing herself off the soft cushions of the sofa to cross to Kathryn’s side. She slid her hands along the same lines Kathryn’s had followed moments before, trailing along the subtle curve of Kathryn’s hips and coming around to settle comfortably in the small of the her back.

“Please. It’s not as if they’re real leather or chaps or anything,” Kathryn complained, tilting her head back, that patented Janeway glare meeting Beverly’s laughing eyes. “We’re going to a party at Chakotay’s  ranch in New Mexico. I just thought these were  a little dressier than jeans. I am an admiral, after all. I have a certain image to maintain.”

“The only ones that will be impressed with your fake leather pants are the cows, honey,” Beverly chortled, singularly unimpressed, as always, by Kathryn’s glare.

“Fine,” Kathryn huffed, pulling out of Beverly’s embrace and stomping towards the bedroom. “I’ll take them off.” She paused in the doorway of their bedroom, a speculative look in her eyes. “Wait a minute. This was all just a ploy to get me out of my pants, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, darling, at times like these it’s so easy to see why they made you an admiral,” Beverly smirked, one hand unbuttoning her blouse, revealing the delicate, creamy lace of her bra, as she moved purposefully across the room.

  
  
**Renascence**  
  
  
The birds rise in a flurry of wings, the sound echoing across the field like the fast shuffle of a deck of cards, their solid bodies a dark stain against the pearly luminescence of dawn creeping across the Indiana sky. Grackles, their raucous cries loud and harsh in the early morning stillness, their sharp, greedy eyes finding her: the lone, disheveled figure on the margin of the fallow pasture.  
  
The hem of her bathrobe is dirty, a thick layer of dust and dried mud clinging to heavy cotton. It’s too big for her, too long. It trails along the ground behind her, the tattered train of a long deposed queen. It had been her father’s, one she’d found shoved way in the back of a seldom used closet in the upstairs hallway, the robe sandwiched between a stained and brittle Macintosh and the moth-eaten wool shawl her mother used to wear on those Sundays she had dragged her unwilling spouse and daughters to the clapboard meeting house that sat, stout and unforgiving, in the center of their small farming community.  
  
Kathryn had always hated those Sundays, hated being forced to don a dress, the collar stiff and itchy along the tender skin of her neck, and trudge up the creaky stairs of the church, her sister’s damp and slightly sticky hand clasped in her own. Hated the stale smell of furniture polish and sanctimony. Even at ten or eleven, she had felt a wash of pity for their unsophisticated neighbors, happy in their simple-minded belief in some kind of supreme being; as if anyone could truly believe in God or angels or heaven.  
  
There is no heaven, of that she’s quite certain. Just as she is certain that Hell exists; exists in charred fragments of hulls left spinning endlessly in space, in a hundred faces she’ll never see again. Beverly tells her she can’t pick and choose, can’t break up the set. Either both or none, not just the one she likes, the one she has wandered in and out of more times than she can count.  
  
 _“It’s all or nothing, babe,” she murmured in Kathryn’s ear last night, the warm rush of her laughter trickling like honey through Kathryn’s veins. “Besides, the way you were just calling out to God, you must believe a little bit.”_  
  
Beverly is still sleeping, or at least Kathryn thinks she is, body curled in a graceful comma beneath layers of cotton and down, pale red hair peeking out like the soft fluffy feathers of some exotic baby bird. Speaking of exotic, this isn’t the vacation that Kathryn promised, the one with the white sandy beaches and sun-dappled waters, but Beverly hasn’t said anything; she merely pulls the thick sweater Gretchen Janeway has given her a little tighter around her slender frame and smiles that knowing smile.  
  
And waits.  
  
Waits for Kathryn to find whatever it is she needs to find on barely remembered paths across barren fields. Waits for a morning to come when she doesn’t wake alone in the wide bed under the slanting farmhouse roof. Waits for Kathryn to set all her ghosts and demons free, to send them wheeling into the early Spring sky on the iridescent black wing of a grackle.  
  
Or so Kathryn hopes, standing as a cold, damp wind snakes up under the ragged hem of her father’s old robe, watching as the last of the birds disappears over the far tree-line, a dark smudge against the sky.  
  
She always hopes.


End file.
